He had no strength left. Yet all he had to do was let go. Let go and all his pain and worries would be gone. And yet he couldn’t let go. Call it his conscience, but something deep and unfamiliar inside him would not allow it. Not unless his nemesis let go first. That was the essential difference between them as human beings.
***********
Eve and Roger Thornhill emerged from an idling Checker cab at the entrance to Imperial House, an immense and recently built white brick condominium apartment building on Manhattan’s upper east side. Both were on extended lunch hours, Eve from the interior designer’s studio where she had begun working only a few weeks before, and Roger from the advertising firm of Norris & Burwell, where his father had wangled his aimless son an entry-level position thirteen years earlier, and from which Roger rose steadily to become one of the shop’s four junior vice-presidents. As such, he was not pressed for time, but Eve was still in her make-a-good-impression phase and they’d already spent fifteen minutes in traffic.
“I hope this won’t take too long,” she said as they entered the revolving door. Roger had a slightly sarcastic response prepared (“You said that in the cab, sweetie”) but the white-gloved sales agent was already waiting for them as they emerged into the building’s vast lobby.
“You must be Mr. Thornhill. “ (She recognized me from my newspaper photo, thought Roger, vaguely flattered). “And Mrs. Thornhill? It’s Elaine, whom you spoke with yesterday? Lovely to meet you both. Right this way, please.” She conducted them along a freshly polished terrazzo floor to the easternmost of the building’s three elevator banks, passing gold-tinted mirrored columns and a wall of glass that looked out at a lush Japanese garden surrounding a large koi pond. Roger found it all a bit glitzy but nodded his approval to Eve as they reached the elevator.
“Twelve please, Armando,” said Elaine to the operator. “Where are you residing now, if I may ask?” she asked. Eve and Roger exchanged questioning glances. “At my mother-in-law’s,” said Eve, and grimaced comically. “She has a place on Fifth,” said Roger, unintentionally making it clear that Imperial House, between Lexington and Third, and despite its sleek modernity, would be something of a step down for him. Armando smiled at the threesome as he discharged them into a plushly carpeted, softly-lit corridor.
Elaine led them down the hall towards apartment 12N. A middle-aged woman with a stiff bouffant of dyed platinum hair emerged from the neighboring unit tugging a yapping wire fox terrier on a leash and blocking everyone’s path. “Fritzi, shush!” she shouted.
“Hello Mrs. Lund,” said Elaine, hoping to quieten the dog.
“Oh, hello Elaine,” said Mrs. Lund, glancing up, “these are my new neighbors?”
“Quite possibly, yes.”
Mrs. Lund gave Eve a once-over and asked, “Do you have children?”
“No, not yet,” said Eve.
“That’s good,” judged Mrs. Lund, and continued past them. “Quiet Fritzi!” The dog went on yapping.
Roger couldn’t imagine a child who could be any more annoying than that dog, or for that matter its scolding master. He exchanged fraught looks with Eve. Elaine shook her head in resignation, unlocked the door to the apartment and ushered the couple into the foyer. “We’ll take it!” said Roger. Elaine laughed. “Roger!” cried Eve, “you haven’t even seen it yet!”
“I thought you were in a hurry,” he said, “and besides, I did study the layout in the brochure.” At that, Roger, although himself once the anonymous author of such florid copy, winced at the memory of the sales brochure’s purple prose:
In regal splendor and spacious elegance Imperial House transcends all previous concepts of modern apartment house luxury. It will not only be the tallest residential building in Manhattan, but the most richly endowed with innovations for gracious and lavish living.
It will occupy an entire city square block, of which over one-half the area will be devoted to exquisitely landscaped gardens, park-like settings of graceful shade trees, rare shrubbery and choice flora – many varieties being costly imported plants and foliage from faraway lands. There will be limpid pools and sparkling fountains, winding walks – a veritable fairyland of enchantment surrounding the majestic structure, enhancing its off-the-street entrance and driveway, its many columned lobby and artistic foyer.
Elaine conducted them toward the Living Rm., but Roger veered off to inspect what he remembered from the brochure plan as the master bedroom, which featured parquet floors; a large en suite bathroom with two washbasins, a shower and a bathtub; his-and-her walk-in closets, and a south-facing terrace. Crossing the spacious room, he slid open the glazed terrace door and stepped outside, grasping the railing and taking in the sweeping midtown Manhattan skyline view. Immediately he recognized the new International Style building fifteen blocks to the south on Third, now conveniently within walking distance, into which Norris & Burwell had moved its offices just a few weeks prior, and beyond it, to the south and east, the upper floors of the United Nations Secretariat, with the mid-day sun glancing harshly off its blue and green curtain wall.
Upon seeing it, Roger felt a sharp pain in the gut, because it was there, on the grounds of the U.N., also only a few weeks before, that his mistaken identity had cost the life of the diplomat Mr. Lester Townsend. He knew he would never forget the horrific sensation of pulling a knife from the man’s back, and watching him fall to the floor, dying if not already dead.
“There you are!” called Eve from the entrance to the bedroom, interrupting his morbid reverie. Elaine stood behind her, beaming very much like an agent about to close a sale to a notable. Roger stepped back into the bedroom. “So, shall I summon the movers?” he asked.
“Don’t you want to look around?”
Roger panned his head from floor to ceiling and then from wall to wall. “Done,” he said, and Elaine laughed again. Roger certainly has a way with women, thought Eve uneasily for about the hundredth time since they’d wed. One-hundred-and-first if you counted the Justice of the Peace in Rapid City, who must have been seventy-five at least, but whom Roger charmed just the same. And since even before they’d wed, now that she thought about it, in fact since they’d first met on the train. “Seven parking tickets,” he’d lied to her after she diverted the police from their pursuit of him. The card, the lovable card.
Once outside, with the doorman attempting to a hail a cab, Roger took Eve’s hand.
“Happy?” he asked.
“Deleriously,” she answered.
“Good. Let’s celebrate,” said Roger.
“Another one of your three-martini lunches?”
“You’re a mind-reader.”
“I wish I could but I have to be back at the office,” said Eve.
“You have to eat, sweetie.”
“I’ll send out for a sandwich.”
“I insist we celebrate over lunch.”
“We can celebrate over dinner.”
“Ah, Eve, you’re too conscientious. How long have you been with them now? Two years?”
“Three weeks.”
“You do know it’s Friday?”
“So…?”
“In my business, we take Friday afternoons off during the summer.”
“Lucky you.”
During the cab ride down Lexington, Eve grew pensive, preoccupied not only with the daunting logistics of packing and moving, but also with the many decisions she would soon have to make about furniture, finishes, light fixtures, draperies, dishware, flatware and so on. With a sigh she reflected yet again on how intuitive and decisive she could be in making such selections on behalf of her clients, and yet how intimidating it was to make them for herself. Roger, typically, had only one thing in mind: the French-dip and a Gibson cocktail at P.J. Clarke’s, the venerable watering hole on Third. Well, two things in mind, if you want to get technical.
He had the cabbie stop just past the intersection with Fifty-Seventh Street, in front of Eve’s building, the townhouse where her employer, the interior designer and antiques dealer Jean-Georges Molyneaux, kept his showrooms, atelier, and residence. They kissed and squeezed hands and she said, “I’ll call you later,” and shut the door. Roger gazed after her in her pink and white sleeveless summer dress, cinched snugly at the waist by a wide white patent leather belt, until she disappeared into the foyer, then sat back contentedly and studied the name and face on the cabbie’s license placard. With a bit of a start he realized that this was the same driver – GANZ, EDWARD -- who had conveyed him from the Plaza Hotel to the UN General Assembly building on the day his unexpected flight from justice began, the same driver who had confidently claimed he could shake Roger’s pursuers, but as it turned out, had failed to do so. At least that’s what Roger thought at the time. Eventually, he realized that his pursuers had probably guessed his next move.
You’d think he’d have recognized me, thought Roger as he studied what he could see of the man’s face in the rear-view mirror. But instead Edward Ganz kept his thoughts to himself, if indeed he had any, and unceremoniously let Roger off in front of his own workplace. Roger paid the man and entered the green marble-clad lobby, then rode solo on an elevator to the twelfth floor. When the doors opened, Jerry Sloan, another one of the junior VP’s – thin, jumpy, insecure, annoying – in others words, the consummate adman -- was standing directly in front of him. Roger stepped off.
“Jerry,” he said and tried to edge his away around his colleague.
“Boy am I glad to see you,” Jerry said and, taking Roger’s arm, yanked him back into the elevator. “Where’ve you been?” he implored, pressing the “DN” button repeatedly until the doors shut.
“Looking at an apartment with my wife,” said Roger, rubbing his upper arm, and anxious because he’d hoped to check in with his secretary before heading out to lunch, “if you must know.”
“Some guy called,” said Jerry heedlessly, “and asked for you. The receptionist couldn’t find you so she transferred him to me.”
Roger studied his upper arm. “I hope you didn’t leave a grease stain on my jacket. Who was he?”
“I didn’t catch the name. Maybe Ward, or Warren. Anyway, something with ‘war’ in it.” The elevator stopped at six and a boisterous group piled in. Sloan modulated his voice down to a whisper, a novelty for him, although in fairness there were other agencies in the building. “Said he was the V.P. of a paper products company. Starting a new line - Cottontail Toilet Tissue.”
“Cottontail, huh? Cute. Catchy. And he asked for me specifically?”
“Yep. I guess you really do have a reputation, Rodge.”
Roger didn’t make much of it. The strength of his name alone had brought more than a few unsolicited clients into the agency’s fold.
“So why are you fleeing the office?”
“He wanted to meet outside.”
“Outside outside? That’s a bit weird.”
“No, I mean not in a conference room setting. He said this was informal. I told him to meet us at Clarke’s and I’d locate you in the meantime.”
“That was good thinking, Jer.”
They were standing at the corner of Fifty-Third, waiting for the light to change. A bus pulled up in front of them, preventing them from crossing. The bus’s doors opened pneumatically. A fat cabbage of a man hurried up to the door but it closed in his face. The bus pulled away. Roger shook his head at the hapless man’s misfortune. The crossing was now clear. Roger’s adman’s mind had already begun to ideate on how to flog Cottontail toilet tissue, distracting him from the idling engines and sulfurous fumes. He had visions of dancing cartoon bunnies.
“Where’s the apartment?” Jerry asked.
“Hm?”
“The apartment you looked at.”
“Oh. Imperial House.”
Jerry whistled. “Imperial House! Look at you! Do you know who lives there?”
“Jerry Lewis?”
“Close. Joan Crawford.”
“My wife will be thrilled. Joan Crawford is her favorite.”